She nods, dropping her tender gaze.
Turning, I stride to Kolden, who’s easing a man to his feet, preparing for our trip back through the tunnel. “Do you have the key to the shackles?” I ask, indicating the boy tucked beneath Calah’s arm.
Kolden gives me a wary look. “I do. But—”
“Get this lot moving through the tunnel—weakest in the middle, strongest at the front and back. Then meet me in the arena.”
“Orlaith—”
“I’m not going without him,” I say, charging on, the only weapon on my body the dagger sheathed at my thigh. The rest are useless where I’m going, anyway.
I burst into the arena, making my way around the edge until I’m standing within eyesight of the Aeshlian caught beneath the Unseelie’s arm. There’s a shackle around his right wrist, probably his left, too, considering the squiggled lengths of chain lying on the filthy ground.
His wide, iridescent gaze is pinned on me.
Again, I look at the big, bulky arm draped over the boy’s midsection, a heavy understanding rooting in my chest like a mountain.
The moment he tries to wriggle loose, the beast will wake.
Which leaves me with one option.
A single glistening tear slips from the corner of the boy’s eye, like he can see the train of my thoughts. The intention in my stare.
Go, he mouths, and I feel that word poke between my ribs and charge into something squidgy.
I shake my head, sensing Kolden’s presence like an approaching landslide. “We can’t draw close enough to release the shackles without waking him,” he grinds into my ear. “The only way to get them out when they’re under his arm like that is to creep in and grab the chain, then drag them past the line, but you don’t want to do that unless they’re dead.Calah gets excited if you try to rip his toy free. Most of the time he tears the bodies to bits on their way out. Being drunk to a slow, sleepy death would be a much kinder way to die.”
I shudder from the base of my skull all the way to the tips of my toes. I’d already thought that option through and came to a similar conclusion, but hearing him spell it out like that is sure to haunt me for the rest of my life.
“The boy’s stuck there,” Kolden tacks on, slamming the words down like the swing of an axe. “He knows it. It’s why he just told you to leave. We’ve got a tunnel full of people we have to get out of Parith before the High Master wakes and hunts you down. We need togo.”
His logic is clear. But like my cloistered emotions, his words don’t land their blow—pitiful against the might of my crystal dome and the stony grit of my determination.
I refuse to let that boy watch us leave him here to die. I’d rather rot in here myself.
Studying the chains lumped upon the ground, snaked about in swirls, I map their trajectory if either man or monster were to move this way or that.
A flash of light rips through the sky-hole, igniting Kolden’s wide eyes as I backstep over the line to the tune of booming thunder. All the color saps from his cheeks as I take slow, backward steps deeper into the dead zone.
Toward themonster.
I spin.
“Orlaith,no—”
“I’ll distract Calah,” I tell Kolden over my shoulder, “but I need you to act the moment he moves. Get the boy free. If Calah catches me,leave.Run and don’t look back. Take everyone straight to Cainon’s personal ship. Captain Gunthar is there with a crew ready to sail to Ocruth.”
A tear shreds down my cheek as the last word falls from my lips, and I realize it’s from a tender vine of reliefcurling around all the broken bits of my heart … an emotion I didn’t think to stuff away.
Why would I?
I’ve been pretending my soul didn’t tumble over the edge of a cliff with the man I murdered, kept busy by all these circles I still had left to spin …
Secure the ships.
Complete The Bowl.
Rescue these lives.
